Institute for Computer Based Learning

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Projects

Ongoing Services and Projects

JournalTOCs

JournalTOCs is a current awareness service for the search community. It has been developed at the ICBL using the outputs produced by the TicTOCs and JournalTOCs-API projects. JournalTOCs is the biggest freely searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) in the world. It contains metadata of nine million articles collected from over 28,000 scholarly journals. The metadata is collected almost immediately after the articles have been published on the website of over 2,000 publishers. JournalTOCs Premium is currently trusted by a diverse range of libraries and information centres across the world. In addition to academic libraries, among its customers are large pharmaceutical companies, hospital libraries, an agency of the United Nations (UN), and an aerospace research centre. Since 2013, JournalTOCs is a self-sustaining service, bringing prestige and financial income to MACS and Heriot Watt University.

Technology Enhancement in MACS

ICBL convenes the Technology Enhancement Group within the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and works with academics with the aim of meeting the aims within the School's Learning and Teaching Strategy that relate to the use of technology to create a more student centred approach to learning, and also reshaping the soft learning environment to meet challenges of delivering courses across campuses in Edinburgh, Dubai, Malaysia, and with learning partners around the world.

Distance Learning in MACS

The School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences offers many of its courses through approved learning partners (ALPs) throughout the world. ICBL is involved in the management of these programmes, in preparing learning resources in a suitable format for delivery through ALPs and in ensuring that students have access to these resources.

Staff involved: Lisa Scott

Past Services and Projects

LinCS

LinCS or LInUX-AD (Enabling Final Year students to enhance their cross-disciplinary communication skills through Language Interpretation and User Experience with Agile Development)
is a QAA (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education) Project funded through the Heriot Watt Enhancement Theme Fund to
further the university's aim to enhance the graduate attributes of its students. This is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary project between the
Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies (LINCS) in the School of Social Sciences (SoSS) and the Department of Computer Sciences (CS) in the School of
Mathematics & Computer Sciences (MACS), aiming to enhance the graduating students' profile and hence their employability prospects in a mutually beneficial way.

Cetis

We were associates of the Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability & Standards with a particular interest in innovative approaches to the management, dissemination and discovery of learning resources, especially Open Educational Resources. Cetis comprises a team of globally recognised experts on education technology innovation, interoperability and technology standards. For over a decade Cetis has provided strategic, technical and pedagogical advice on educational technology and standards to funding bodies, standards agencies, government, institutions and commercial partners.

Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Through our work with Cetis we have been involved with Learning Resource Metadata Initiative project (LRMI) since its inception. The initiative, which builds on the work of Schema.org, aims to support the discovery of relevant education resources on the web. LMRI is is currently a community specification of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative being maintained and developed by the DCMI LRMI Task Group.

MOOD

MOOD (Making Online-first Open-access Discoverable) is a Knowledge Transfer Project between Heriot Watt University and Inderscience Publishers Ltd
with the long term aim of developing a sustaining collaborative relationship between Scholarly Publishers and the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences in the field of e-publication workflow optimization.
The specific purpose is to investigate and develop technologies which could be prototyped by the publisher partner and be used as a model with other publishers needing to enable
current-awareness-focused discovery & delivery of Online-first Open-Access content, as early as possible in their publishing workflow and, reflecting the changing e-business models of scholarly publishing.

Europeana

Europeana is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. It is an authoritative source of information coming from European cultural and scientific institutions. We are Europeana research partners as part of its Technical Working Group 3.

TechXtra

TechXtra was a free service aimed to help the discovery of engineering, mathematics and computing resources and information, e.g. articles, books, websites, news, jobs reports and data. TechXtra was an spint-out of the PerX Project and was developed at the ICBL with input from Heriot-Watt University Library.
As Dec 2016, the TechXtra website is still available to access TechTOCs, OneStepJobs, OneStepNews, RAM Database, Selected Books and the archive of the PerX Project.

X-PARC

X-PARC is a Joint Industry Project (JIP) between Inderscience Publishers and JournalTOCs to create a prototype of a new XML-first workflow technology to produce scholarly output in a variety of digital market channel ready forms, in particular current-awareness oriented reusable formats. The project will trial a suitable open licence policy for the RSS feeds produced by scholarly publishers. The JIP also provides JournalTOCs Team with the opportunity of working within a real industrial environmental and understand the RSS issues from the publisher perspective.

JASS

JASS (Journals and Articles via SUNCAT Services) is a joint collaboration between EDINA and JournalTOCs to develop a RESTful web service to integrate JournalTOCs data on SUNCAT web pages. JurnalTOCs data will be made accessible in SUNCAT through the JASS web service using the MODS schema as metadata exchange format.

Delores OER

Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design is a project to present static and dynamic collections of university-level Open Educational Resources (OERs) and other openly available resources relevant to Engineering Design.

WattJournals

WattJournals has prototyped a tailored journal current awareness service for the Heriot-Watt University Library, to give Heriot-Watt University students and staff immediate full-text access to the latest articles published in the issues of 4,600 journals that produce TOC RSS feeds and to which Heriot-Watt University Library subscribes.

Bayesian Feed Filter

The Bayesian Feed Filter aims to identify those articles that are of interest to specific researchers from a set of RSS feeds of Journal Tables of Content by applying the same approach that is used to filter out junk emails.

Engineering and Materials UK OER projects

We provide technical advice and input relating to resource discovery, aggregation and management to two distinct discipline based projects in the Academy/JISC Open Education Resource Programme. Our input highlights the use of web 2.0 technologies to facilatate dissemination and discovery of these resources.

WattNames

The aim of the WattNames project is to trial an institutional identity resolver based on URIs to enable the production of reliable and unambiguous identification of researchers from Heriot-Watt University.

JournalTOCs-API

JournalTOCs-API is a JISC funded project building on the outputs of the TicTocs project where researchers, academics and anyone else can keep up-to-date with scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). The JournalTocs-API project aims to develop a facility whereby repository managers can monitor current journal issues to identify published papers for Institutional Repositories.

TicTOCs

TicTOCs is a Jisc-funded project which aims to develop a freely available service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment. The intention is to make journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) available in a user-friendly environment. In order to do so, it will aggregate RSS feeds for TOCs from various journal publishers.

Gold Dust

Gold Dust is a Jisc-funded project which aims to produce and test a prototype and consequently a demonstrator for the delivery of highly relevant, personalised current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics, ultimately without the need for any input by those academics in the personalisation process.

Learning Materials Application Profile scoping study

The LMAP scoping study aims to identify the relevant resource types and activities associated with maintaining a repository of digital learning materials; ascertain current advice on best practice in describing the properties of learning materials pertinent to each of these types and activities; and synthesize and analyse the resulting set of metadata requirements.

Visual Directory of Image Collections

This case study carried out on behalf of the Engineering Subject Centre for the JISC examined the feasibility of producing a visual directory of community led image collections by aggregating RSS feeds provided by the collections.

LearnEM

LearnEM is a joint project of the Engineering Subject Centre and the UK Centre for Materials Education that is managed from ICBL as part of our involvement with the Engineering Subject Centre. The aim of the project is to promote the sharing of learning resources by taking resources that, as a result of IPR, technical or cultural issues, are currently locked into disparate collections and making them available as learning objects through the Jorum repository.

MATTER Rejuvenation

With funding from the UK Centre for Materials Education, this project is updating several units from the TLTP Matter CD ROM to produce IMS Content Packages of HTML and Flash content that can be easily edited and uploaded to common learning environments (e.g. VLEs such as BlackBoard, WebCT and Moodle).

Staff involved: Lisa Rogers, Neil Fegen, Phil Barker

Ended: 2007

PERX

PERX is a joint JISC-funded project between ICBL, EEVL and several other partners, which aims to develop and pilot a discipline-focused resource discovery service by federated search across a number of repositories of interest to the Engineering teaching, learning and research communities. The project will investigate technical and cultural issues relating to functionality, sustainability and advocacy of such a service.

ReSET

In collaboration with Glasgow Caledonian University, several colleges in the Glasgow area, and a number of producers of eLearning content, ICBL is involved in the ReSET project, which will "rejuvenate" existing tried-and-tested but old computer-based learning resources. The project is selecting sections of material from resources created in the last decade or so that
are suitable for use in HND/HNC level science engineering and technology courses, and updating the implementation of these resources so that they are stand-alone standards compliant, sharable, reusable learning objects.

EEVL technical input

EEVL, the Internet guide to Engineering Mathematics and Computing is part of the JISC-funded Resource Discovery Network. EEVL is led by Heriot-Watt University Library with ICBL providing the technical development and maintenance effort. EEVL Xtra is a cross search portal information in the EEVL subject domain.

Long-term Retention and Reuse of E-learning Objects and Materials

JISC-funded joint study involving ICBL and the Arts and Humanities Data Service examining the factors that may affect the long-term retention of digital learning materials and how to make them available for reuse for as long as possible.

Learning for a Healthier Nation

JISC-funded project lead by Lauder College in Edinburgh that aimed to promote the exchange of learning materials relevant to health care. ICBL provided expertise on the evaluation of the learning resources.

VDEX Implementation Project

CETIS-related project that aimed to explore the usefulness and limitations of the IMS VDEX draft specification for Vocabulary Definition Exchange by extending the RELOAD metadata and content package editor to handle VDEX instances.

EASEIT-Eng

Evaluative and Advisory Support to Encourage Innovative Teaching in Engineering was a HEFCE-funded project evaluating the use of computer-based learning resources in engineering, on which several ICBL staff worked as evaluators.